The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  My sister leaned forward. “My life has changed, Erik. The days aren’t hard. I work. I read. It’s the evenings that are hard to get through. I watch old movies, but often I can’t pay attention. Even when Sonia came home late or was in her room, even when she barely spoke to me, it was different. She was there. I had to be the mother. I love being the mother. Without Sonia in the apartment, I lose track of myself. I have bad thoughts. I remember Max dying, then Pappa dying. I see Lisa’s baby in the ground. I imagine Sonia in a car accident, that she’s dead, that you get cancer like Max, and I’m sitting by you in the hospital. I imagine Mamma’s funeral, then my own. Nobody comes to mine, of course. I’m forgotten. Nobody reads my books. They’re out of print.” Inga’s expressive face took on a tragic look. “When I was a girl, every once in a while, I would have a sudden thought or image in my head that some beloved person had turned into a monster. I would see the horrible face for an instant. It’s happened again a few times.” Inga’s voice got louder. I looked at the table next to us. They weren’t listening. “It’s as if I can’t help what’s coming,” she said. “When I’m very sleepy and I’ve worn myself out with all this nonsense, I sometimes hear Max’s voice. It’s mean or tired or neutral.” My sister sniffed loudly and put her hand to her mouth. “It’s never kind.” On the word kind, her voice broke into a small wail.

  I found myself smiling.

  She looked hurt. “You think I’m an idiot.”

  “Just a little bit,” I said.

  She stared at her decaffeinated espresso, then raised her chin and smiled at me. “Isn’t it funny,” she said. “I feel much better now that you’ve called me an idiot. Let’s go see if Sonia and her Romeo are at the loft.”

  After the mysterious lump of arms and legs on the sofa had disentangled itself, it turned into my niece and her beloved, a lanky boy with wild dark hair and sincere eyes who shook my hand firmly—a good sign, I thought. Sonia hugged me, and when I looked down into her face, I had the odd impression that she looked younger, that her soft cheeks and mouth had the sweetness of a baby’s. It occurred to me that she had emerged from her adolescence rounder, that the sharp angles and razor edges of that bitter time of life had now vanished.

  She was flushed and shining when she spoke to her mother. “I’ve told René everything, so you don’t have to worry, but the Hamburger lady came by about an hour ago. Mom, she was rambling. She might have been drunk. I don’t know, but she was talking about some bag lady who’d hit her with an umbrella. ‘The city’s not safe!’ ” Sonia imitated the woman’s voice. “Then she said to tell you that Edie’s sold the letters.”

  Inga clasped her hands in front of her. “To whom?”

  I watched René reach for Sonia’s hand and fold it into his own.

  “I asked her,” Sonia said, “but she refused to say. I’m not sure she even knows. In fact, I don’t get what she wants. Why does she care?”

  Inga shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never understood it.”

  “It’s personal,” I said.

  Sonia looked at me. “It’s such a strange word, personal. I’ve often wondered exactly what’s impersonal.”

  In the cab back to Brooklyn, I thought about Sonia’s words and my sister’s face when we parted. Inga had seemed calm, but her skin had turned a flat white.

  AT AROUND SEVEN o’clock Monday evening, Eggy knocked on my door. She was wearing a ski mask with holes in it for her eyes and mouth. She looked up at me, her lips moving. I couldn’t hear what she had said, so I asked her to repeat it.

  “I’ve come on a mission,” she whispered.

  “Does your mother know?”

  Eggy nodded. I had left a message for Miranda, thanking her for the letter and the drawing and telling her about the compromise with the gallery. She had called me back and left her own message to say she was glad, but we hadn’t spoken. I began to hope she would come upstairs to collect her daughter.

  Eggy took several long, toe-first strides into the room, holding her hands tightly behind her back. Then she stopped, looked both ways, as if she were crossing the street, and revealed what she had been hiding: a large ball of white string. She took my hand, led me over to the sofa, and gently pushed me down onto it. As I watched, she began to unwind the string. Once she had several loose feet, she tied the end to the coffee table and looped it around a chair and then the sofa’s legs, making comments like “Hmm, that’s very good,” “Good line,” and “Excellent.” And so it went. I couldn’t see her face, but I noted that her eyes, which had been shining with mischief, became more concentrated as she worked. By the time she had used all the string, she had made a vast web that connected every piece of furniture in the room, and I was part of it, since Eggy had bound my two feet and hands to the table as part of her creation. Then, she slid back the mask to the top of her head, crawled under the string, and sat beside me on the sofa.

  “That was my mission,” she said, “to tie everything together.”

  “I see that, and it seemed to me that you had a good time doing it.”

  Eggy sat very still. “This way nothing’s away from anything else. It’s all tied.”

  “It’s all tied,” I repeated.

  Eggy lifted a piece of string behind her neck, leaned back in the sofa, made a large noisy sigh, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Why do you know about children when you don’t have them?”

  “I used to be one, you know, a long time ago.”

  “When you peed in your bed.”

  “Yes, I peed for a while, and then it went away.”

  “But you were a bad, messy, wet boy.” I could hear the excitement in her voice and was wondering how I should answer her when all of a sudden Miranda was standing in front of us, and I remembered that I had left the door to the apartment open.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Not again.”

  “Dr. Erik said it was okay. He likes it,” Eggy piped.

  Miranda shook her head, but she smiled. “You’ll have to undo it. You can’t keep Erik tied up in there forever.”

  “No, not yet, please, please, please, Mommy, let it stay for a while, please.”

  I told Eglantine that we’d leave her “artwork” intact for a couple of days, but because I needed to go to work in the morning, she’d have to let me go. This seemed to satisfy her, and once it was all decided, Miranda helped release me from my fetters. As she pulled at the mess of string, her hand brushed my ankle. Her touch made me stupidly happy, but I thought of Laura then and remembered I had promised to call her the next day. My turmoil had begun to seem ridiculous, even to myself.

  Because there was nowhere to sit in the living room, I went upstairs to the library and read for several hours. After finishing a badly written article in Science, I had taken one of Winnicott’s books off the shelf, Thinking About Children, and opened it to a place where he was writing about his work as a pediatrician, how he liked treating the bodies of children, that examining people physically can be important for their mental health: “People need to be seen.” I remember the sentence, not only because it struck me as true, but because I had just read it when I heard a person on the stairs.

  I thought of Lane, but I knew that my front door was locked and that the hatch to the roof was also locked. Nevertheless, I froze as I listened to the soft tread on the steps. It turned out to be Miranda. She was standing in the doorway, her eyes on me. It was her second appearance that evening, but this time she was dressed in a white bathrobe, and I could see the bare skin just above her breasts. She walked into the room, sat down in a chair opposite me, and said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. I think it’s because I’ve been hiding it for a long time and somehow I don’t want to hide it from you.”

  “All right,” I said, without suppressing the surprise in my voice.

  “Remember my uncle Richard? I told you about him once.”

  “Yes, he died.”

  Miranda nodded, and her eyes grew thoughtful. “He was
a gentle person and rather shy. Sometimes he hesitated when he talked, but he had a good sense of humor and was very smart. My father always said, ‘Richard has the head for numbers.’ My little sister Alice once asked Dad if we could see the numbers in Uncle Richard’s head. My father’s parents were both dead, and we girls were all close to Richard, but I was the one who made him drawings, and he took them very seriously and made comments about them. He framed one on his wall—a portrait I did of him when I was nine. I remember working hard on his clothes because he had nice clothes, beautiful shirts in soft colors. He used to take trips to Miami sometimes and come home with presents for us. Once, he brought me a book of Degas’s drawings. That gift made me feel more important and grown up than I’d ever felt before. On May 7, 1981—I was eleven and a half.” Miranda hugged herself and her voice dropped. “The phone rang. My father answered it, and he just said ‘Richard’ in this awful voice. His body had been found that morning in West Kingston. He’d been stabbed and beaten. There was an investigation, but nothing ever came of it. The police didn’t make any arrests.” Miranda took a large shuddering breath and continued. “At Richard’s funeral, an American man was there, a person nobody knew. He was tall and handsome, and I remember his suit made me think he must be rich. He came up to me and said, ‘Miranda, I was a friend of your uncle Dick’s. He told me you’re a very talented little girl.’ I wanted to talk more, but my father came over, and without really being impolite, nodded at the man and pulled me away. Dad didn’t break down at the funeral. It happened later. That night. I heard him with Mum in the other room. He said, ‘You can’t know what’s in your own family.’ Then he sobbed.

  “When I was thirteen, we went back to Jamaica for my great-auntie Yvonne’s funeral, and there was a boy there, older than me, supposedly a relation, but I didn’t know him, Freddy. I said something to him about Auntie Yvonne being old and Uncle Richard young, and that it’s much sadder to die when you’re young. He looked at me, and I saw his face turn ugly. He said one word, ‘Battyman.’ ”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a nasty word for gay. It shocked me, Erik. I’d never thought about it, I mean, when it came to my uncle. I told him it wasn’t true. And then Freddy said something else.” Miranda was almost whispering. “He told me that Uncle Richard had tried his ‘wickedness’ on a teenage boy he knew. I can’t believe that . . .” A tear slid down Miranda’s cheek and she wiped it away. “We didn’t know who he was. He had to hide.”

  “Did being gay have something to do with his death?”

  Miranda rubbed her arms with her hands. “I don’t know. They took his money but left his wallet. My father can’t talk about it. I’ve tried a couple of times, but he won’t go into it. The shame is thick. Dad’s a liberal-minded man, but it’s as if he can’t, just can’t address it.

  “I sometimes think that it made me—the murder, I mean, that I can’t ever get past it. There are days when I don’t think of it and then it’s there again. I imagine his terror when they come after him, imagine him bleeding and dying in the street. But there’s also the secrecy. It’s against the law to have same-sex relations in Jamaica, and the hatred is terrible.” Miranda looked up at me. “You know, I always wanted to be a boy, the son my father didn’t have. I played the boy in games with my sisters, and I imitated the way boys walked, that swagger, you know, and their tough talk, and then for a couple of years I thought maybe I was like Uncle Richard. Sometimes, I had feelings for girls.” She paused. “As time went on, that faded away, but I was really tormented for a while. I’ve been thinking of drawing something about it now, doing research and making a series. I’d like to track down that man in Miami. I’d like Eglantine to know about it, about Richard. My parents already find my work, well, rather shocking, so they’d be hurt, I’m sure.”

  “Are you looking for permission?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “It’s not for me to give,” I said quietly.

  “I know the picture in the show upset you.”

  “It did. I felt exploited, and one of my patients saw it and was badly shaken.”

  “Jeff wanted me to tell you that he used it as an image of the dangerous father, not you as you. He said, ‘Tell him it’s transference and that it’s the fathers who make the wars.’ He’s interested in anger, in explosions. That photo was a violation of your privacy, but it was powerful, and I understand why Jeff wanted it in the show. I can get really angry. Sometimes it’s like a fire inside me, and it helps when I’m drawing, helps to push me ahead and not be frightened of what I’m doing. Jeff’s father was an angry man. He used to yell and bang his fists on the table. It scared Jeff to death when he was little. His dad was a doctor, too. A cardiologist with a bad temper. Jeff doesn’t even know why his parents were in that car together. They had been divorced for a long time. He tried to find out, but none of their friends seemed to know, and Jeff was on bad terms with both of them. Sometimes, he thinks his father crashed the car on purpose, but there’s no evidence for that.”

  “You wanted me to know all this?” I said.

  Miranda looked me in the eyes. “I know it sounds silly, but I think it was the string, seeing you all tied up in that string. You just let it happen and didn’t stop her, and then you looked so funny and serious when I came upstairs, sitting there calmly in Eggy’s net as if nothing had happened to you.”

  “Seeing me tied up made you want to come upstairs and tell me these things?”

  “Well, it doesn’t make any sense, but yes.”

  Miranda had brought her legs up into the chair and folded them under her and she looked younger than usual. I realized that she had never been so open with me, and it made her vulnerable.

  “Well,” I said, “Eggy’s trying to repair what’s been broken by tying everything together. Maybe you wanted to tie things up with me.”

  “I’ve seen the way you look at me. I know that you like me, but I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s really me you like.”

  I found it difficult to look at her.

  “Jeff’s been so jealous, and I didn’t want to take advantage of your feelings, even though I’m drawn to you. But tonight I wanted you to know more about me.” She paused. “I feel safe with you. You’re a good person.”

  Safe and good reverberated powerfully with tameness. Miranda stood up and walked toward me, sat down on the sofa, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her, pulled her closer to me, and there we sat for a long time without saying a word. I understood that Miranda had offered me the story of her uncle Richard as a gift. Through it, she had meant to explain not her uncle, but herself. Maybe you’ve kept a secret in your heart that you felt in all its joy or pain was too precious to share with someone else. The murder had become a wall that divided her life into before and after, and I guessed that her childhood had been left on the other side. Shame, no matter how unjustified, had muddied the purity of the family’s outrage and left its sting in all of them, especially her father. He’s interested in anger, in explosions. They died instantly. Maybe the violent deaths in their lives had bound Miranda and Lane together. She had said it was the string, seeing me all tied up in the string that made her want to speak to me. Telling always binds one thing to another. We want a coherent world, not one in bits and pieces.

  Then she turned to me, put her cheek against my chest, and said, “You know, it’s hard being a mother all the time, having to take care of everything. Even at work, I feel like that sometimes. Ask Miranda. Miranda will do it. Good old, competent, in-charge Miranda. Jeff’s always needed attention, too. Sometimes I wish someone would take care of me just a little bit.” I felt some tears through my shirt.

  I stroked her head and her back, felt the rough texture of her hair under my fingers and then the small protuberance of each vertebra down her spine beneath the white terrycloth and experienced a subdued erotic pleasure. I was playing the mother, after all, not the lover. I had finally taken hold of what Laura had called my “fant
asy object,” a woman I had lusted after for months, only to find a child in my arms. It started to rain then. We listened to the drops hitting the windows in the room and battering the skylight one floor above us, and I remembered Lane running across the roofs. It’s a miracle when the passions of two people actually collide, I thought. So often they dart off in unexpected directions, and there’s no chasing them down.

  I don’t know how long I held her or what time it was when she left me and walked down the stairs to the apartment. I think it was around one. I do know that when she gave me a last hug it had stopped raining.

  IN THE MORNING, I woke to an erection and the confused, discomfiting fragments of a dream about a strange woman in dishabille, her naked breasts entangled in the limp spaghetti that had mysteriously enveloped my kitchen—a translation of Eggy’s umbilical string, no doubt. It was only as I emerged from that woozy, liminal state that I remembered Miranda coming into the room in her white robe to tell me the story of her uncle Richard’s murder and to find some consolation in my arms. During the day, as I listened to my patients, the memory of her voice intruded a few times. I played the boy. Good old competent Miranda. He said to tell you it’s transference. I also imagined a man lying in a street bleeding and broken and wondered what West Kingston looked like, because the street I conjured belonged to no real place. Mr. T. came to visit me that day. After two weeks in the hospital, he had been in outpatient care at Payne Whitney. I was pleased to see him more coherent and thinner now that he had dispensed with the olanzapine. His new regimen—carbamazepine, risperidone, a low dose of lithium, the antidepressant bupropion, and zolpidem for sleep—had helped him.